2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Established in 1994, The Course offers innovative and exciting lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.
In this series on German Art, we will go from medieval to modern Germany through artists who would come to be a major influence not just on Northern art but also on the Italian Renaissance and ultimately European art. It will begin in the 1460s and demonstrate the interconnectivity of German artists through their itinerancy, their ingenuity, and rigorous work ethic. Each of the weekly lectures will take a look at an individual artist and in so doing take us from the medieval wood carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, to the Renaissance art of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger, to the Baroque art of Adam Elsheimer; from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism and finally to German art of the 19th century with its impact on French Impressionism.
Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein was born in c.1497-8 in Augsburg and was taught by his father, Hans Holbein the Elder. Recommended to the court of Henry VIII by the humanist Erasmus Deriderius, he spent two periods of his life in England (1526-8 and 1532-43), portraying the nobility of the Tudor court. We will look at his work including his most famous portraits, Henry VIII and “The Ambassadors”. The latter, an enigmatic full-length double portrait is a political statement as much as a record of two friends (Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, the Bishop of Lavaur) at a time of turmoil and upheaval (1533) when Henry VIII was seeking to divorce Catherine of Aragon in order to re-marry Anne Boleyn.